a Raspberry Pi as a Desktop

About a month ago, I got a Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB of RAM to use as a simple desktop. The idea of low power computing has interest me for a while, so figured it was high time to give it a go. Making due with limited resources has always intrigued me. In some ways it has also shown me that I don’t REALLY need that many resources to do the things that I want to do on a computer. There’s the nice to haves and then there are the essentials.

Unsurprisingly, the majority of the computers I’ve used over the years had parts to give them enough oomph to play games competently. Take that away, or at least drastically dial it back, and suddenly I don’t even need a fraction of the horsepower. Simple retro games work just fine on the thing, and usually that’s more than enough for me when I’m on the thing. Even then, I’m not terribly inclined to play games on the system.

One area that I’ve seen resources get absolutely gobbled up, though, is basically any conventional web browser. Everything I’ve tried so far has caused the CPU usage to shoot up to around 70-80%. It’s no secret that browsers are system hogs, and sites are bloated messes, but running them on the Pi was really eye opening. Even doing simple searches took forever, and loading things on YouTube was nightmarishly slow. Thankfully, there are workarounds. I’ve had the chance to become acquainted with Lynx and it’s officially my favorite browser from now on. The simplicity of it is so wonderful. It cuts out so much of the crap I don’t want from the Web. For YouTube videos, I just download them and view them at my leisure from now on.

This has further put the bloat of the web into perspective for me. Old timey sites load at a respectable speed. After that, though, everything is a bit of a slog. Even search engines are clunky as they load things. It makes me miss Web directories where I could look things up simply by navigating sub-categories until I got where I wanted. They were just HTML with some links, not exactly complicated affairs. Sadly, places like that are either long dead and gone, or are sad, forgotten places that haven’t been updated in a decade or two. Personally, I’d love to see them make a comeback, as it’s always been my preferred way of finding info.

Anyway, that’s a different topic for a different day. Back to the Pi. One of the other reasons I got one was to start familiarizing myself with a Linux environment. Ideally, I want to make my next desktop run on Linux (or at least dual boot), but am waiting for video cards to become more readily available, and prices to be slightly less insane. So, for now, the Pi has been serving me reasonably well.

One of the nice things about this situation is that it has provided me the opportunity to start getting somewhat familiar with the Linux terminal. I’ve become thoroughly comfortable with a GUI set up over the years, and haven’t had to worry about a type-y approach to things since DOS back in the early 90s. So, getting acquainted with the terminal has been an interesting, and somewhat nostalgic experience.

I haven’t exactly done anything exciting in it yet, mostly just navigating folders, installing stuff, and fiddling around with audio controls. Oh, and setting up this capsule, although that was basically just me following Chris Were’s instructions on how to create a Gemini server. Still, it’s a start. One thing I really need to get a handle on is entering file paths properly because when I try to use the scp command to slap files on this capsule, I seem to have a real knack for messing it up. Oh well, I’ll just keep practising until things get ironed out.

To help with installing certain things, I’ve also downloaded something called PiKISS (which stands for Keep It Simple, Stupid). It’s written in Bash and works in the terminal, helping to install a variety of things ranging from games to emulators to utilities and a bunch of other stuff. I mostly got it so I can get a few emulators setup for old video games. It has a version of Mario 64 made specifically for Linux that caught my attention as well, so I may check that out at some point. Maybe I’ll write a thingie specifically about PiKISS in the future after I’ve spent more time with it.

One last thing I like about my Pi is that it’s nice and quiet. Granted, it’s just a chip on a board, so of course it’s going to be quiet. Mine came as a kit with a case, heat sinks, and a pair of fans, but still it doesn’t make a sound. It’s a very nice change of pace from so many of my other PCs and console that all wind up having roaring fans wailing away. I’ve always wanted to make a PC with no moving parts just so I have one that is dead silent, but that isn’t really feasible. The Pi is the closest match I have right now, albeit a rather under-powered one. Still the quiet is nice.

So, using the Pi as a desktop has been fun. It’s obviously not as fast as a purpose built one, but in some ways I think this helps drive home the sheer amount of bloat polluting computers these days, especially browsers and the Web as a whole. While wandering the Web causes CPU usage to skyrocket (outside of Lynx of course), everything else works acceptably well for what I want to do. If push came to shove, I could probably get by just fine with only a Pi desktop. It does what I need it to just fine.

- Pennywhether

March 22, 2021

pennywhether@posteo.net